“You understand what these are? Were?” he asked Susan, tapping one of the cylinders.

“Aye. When there was electricity, some went through here.” She paused, then added shyly: “It’s how I feel when you touch me.”

He kissed her cheek just below her ear. She shivered and pressed a hand briefly against his cheek before drawing away.

“I hope your friends will watch well.”

“They will.”

“Is there a signal?”

“The whistle of the nighthawk. Let’s hope we don’t hear it.”

“Aye, be it so.” She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.

13

The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn’t heard since her father died) and dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.

“Be easy! It’s only the candle! The gas-pipe!”

He relaxed slowly. “That they use, don’t they?”

“Aye. To run a few machines—little more than toys, they are. To make ice, mostly.”

“I had some the day we met the Sheriff.”

When the flare licked out again—bright yellow with a bluish core—he didn’t jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called “the candle” without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in which the gas could be bottled and carried.

“You’ve seen such before?” she asked.

He nodded.

“The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful,” Susan said.

“I’m beginning to think they’re no stranger than those of the Outer Arc,” he said, turning slowly. He pointed. “What’s yon building down there? Left over from the Old People?”

“Aye.”

To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it—this lane was as clear in the moonlight as a part in hair. Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks—that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.

“There were useful things in there when my da was a child,” she said. “Paper and such—even a few ink-writers that would still work... for a little while, at least. If you shook them hard.” She pointed to the left of the building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting hulks that had been the Old People’s weird, horseless mode of travel. “Once there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn’t rust like those that are left. I can’t think what became of them, unless someone hauled them off for water storage. I never would. ’Twould be unlucky, even if they weren’t contaminated.”